The President's policy amounts to throwing young men and women into the volcano of Iraq's civil strife and hoping that their sacrifice somehow appeases the angry gods of war. He does this in a last ditch effort to justify his war and occupation, against the opposition of Congress and the expressed opinion of the American people.

We embolden the enemy by leaving? No, we embolden the enemy by staying. As long as we prop it up, the Iraqi government will not be viewed as legitimate. As long as we stay, the Iraqi troops do not take command of the streets. It is time for the Iraqi government to lead, and for us to leave. We removed Saddam, now they must govern their own country.

We are not in position to determine the outcome of this Civil War, and sacrificing another 500 or 1000 US soldiers only postpones the day when Iraqis themselves must decide whether they can live together or not.

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It is too easy to let the major media off the hook by saying they were "mislead" by the faulty intelligence of Tony Blair, George Bush, Condi Rice, and others....

If many of us who don't have the privilege of being a political, government, or media insider, of having friends in the CIA, or MI5, or other "intelligence" agencies, could easily know that the illegal US-British invasion of Iraq was not only a mistake, but a lie and a sham, why couldn't the brilliant reporters and editors of the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX (perhaps I shouldn't use the word "brilliant" so often!), figure this out?

They are not that stupid. They were subjected to pressure from their corporate bosses to support Bush, to be "patriotic,", to support Israel and US oil companies at all costs....

In some ways, the corporate-owned news media are a bigger problem than the politicians, who come and go like the wind...
we can vote for a new President and a new Congress, but how do we get fair-minded, honest, and objective owners, editors, and reporters in our news media?

The US news media have consistently failed to give a fair shake to third and fourth-party "alternative" voices like Ralph Nader and the Libertarians and Greens, even right-wingers like Pat Buchanan and eccentric billionaires like Ross Perot (who was right about many things, especially the "giant sucking sound" of American jobs being lost to Mexico, China, India, and other developing nations)

Ralph Nader is not crazy, Ross Perot may be a little eccentric but at least he is basically honest and patriotic, Pat Buchanan, though I disagree with some of his racist panderings, is a brilliant and basically sincere man who told the truth as he saw it....and us poor Libertarians, and the Greens, never get any press coverage at all!

I distrust the leadership of both the Republican and Democratic parties, because they are almost totally corrupted and in the pockets of big money, whether it's the oil companies and defense contractors, the pharmaceutical industry, the trial lawyers, the AMA, the AHA....choose your poison!

These groups have a right to express their views, too, and they are not all evil people trying to steal our birthright...but they are basically very selfish, and too powerful, special-interest groups, and the politicians are too weak, too gullible, too naive, too greedy, too power-hungry, too pathetic to stand up to them.

That's why we need an honest, independent news media...but we don't have it in the USA any more, if indeed we ever did...

Gary

Gary James Minter
http://aidsvillagechina.blog.sohu.com
www.healthchina.org

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